The Flip Phone
by Indygodusk
Summary: Just who would dare to give Tony Stark of all people an old-school flip phone? Why Clint Barton, of course. (Spoilers for Civil War)
Disclaimer: Captain America – Civil War the movie and its characters do not belong to me.

 **The Flip Phone**

 _By Indygodusk_

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After very little deliberation, Clint decided to choose the phone most guaranteed to piss off Tony. Alone at the little kiosk in the middle of the bustling mall, Clint allowed himself a mean smile. Perhaps it wasn't what Steve would have preferred, but if he wanted a phone that would kiss up to the almighty Iron Man, he should have chosen someone else for this errand. Clint was no one's personal shopper!

Ripping open the bag of candy he'd bought at the last shop, Clint ate a piece and ignored his wife's snort of disbelief in his head. Admittedly, he would buy anything for his wife, even tampons, romance novels, and artisan flavored waters, though he did steal the grapefruit ones. And sometimes he'd read the sex scenes from her romance novels out loud to her until she shrieked in mortification and tackled him onto the bed. That was always fun.

To be honest, he also would and had bought anything for Nat. She'd stolen Coulson's signature eyebrow raise to get him to do stuff. He tried to hide when that look came out, but she was sneaky. His response to that look was practically pavlovian. If he wasn't careful, he'd find himself fetching her sandwiches and extra knives without even a token argument.

Although he still missed working with Coulson like a throbbing deep bruise that would never heal, he didn't miss the way Coulson could manipulate him so easily into writing boring reports and toeing the line. With how the world had gone to hell, there'd probably be no getting Phil to come out to visit this year. The kids would be upset. Clint was upset!

Grimacing to himself, Clint moved around the corner of the little kiosk and popped another piece of the local candy into his mouth. He'd already forgotten the name, though if pressed he could recall it, but the chalky fruit flavor was oddly unpleasant so it was unlikely he'd buy it again. However, he was hungry and trying to fit in, so he ate another piece.

The first few rows on the kiosk held smartphones with big brand names (more than half of which were likely knockoffs) boasting colors like electric blue, space black, deep sea pearl, and jungle gold. In prize of place sat a hotrod red phone in the middle of the top row with gold corners. Tony would love it. Steve would have chosen that phone because this was for Tony and Steve had been raised to tailor gifts for the personality of the recipient. It would have been polite and a good gesture.

However, Steve wasn't the one buying here. Clint was.

Tony had made Clint come out of retirement, miss water skiing with his kids, and gotten him, Wanda, and Sam thrown into prison, a prison without even a tv to catch up on his favorite soap operas and reality tv shows. Tony had bowed down to the UN and General Ross and ruined one of the best things Clint had ever been a part of.

He'd also made Hawkeye face off against his friends. The fighting had been heart wrenching (though also sort of awesome in that adrenaline rush of pitting yourself against the best out there and managing to not only survive but hold your own, though he'd sound like a heartless, uncaring bastard if he said that out loud to any of the others but Nat). But privately he could divorce the excitement of fighting full out with the frustration and betrayal of fighting full out against people who had started to transition from friends into family. It sucked.

Clint especially hated fighting on the opposite side as Nat. It never went well. He'd beaten her the first time they met and then had to live on that one glorious memory. In a ranged fight he outclassed her, obviously, but to be honest, Nat almost always beat him at hand-to-hand combat. In her sneakiness she always closed fast to limit his options. Luckily Wanda had jumped in. The kid thought he'd been pulling his punches. He was going to let her keep thinking that too.

Clint knew that this whole thing was a very complicated and divisive issue. He knew everyone was just trying to do what they thought was best for the world and the Avengers and the situation with the Winter Soldier. He even realized that although Barnes had been completely screwed over and deserved sympathy and a chance at redemption like Nat, he was also one dangerous mother who could be reprogrammed at any second to try and kill everyone and that he had already killed a ton of other people in the past, including Tony's parents. He could acknowledge that it made everything very emotional and difficult for Steve, Tony, and Bucky himself.

But right now those reasons still didn't make what had happened okay. Clint was still pissed off. First he'd lost Coulson (who thank god had come back from the dead but damn Nick Fury had come back a bit different) and then Shield went down and now the Avengers were gone too (and yeah, he'd been retired for a bit, but he hadn't intended for it to be forever).

All because Tony had felt guilty and couldn't see the bigger picture enough to take responsibility , accept that not everything could be controlled, get off his ass, and refuse to sign the contract with the UN carte blanch, or at least to negotiate a whole lot more. Clint was too mad right now to give much credit for how, for all of his overconfidence, Tony struggled exactly because he cared so much, and that it made it hard for him to focus on the bigger picture. Tony still didn't have a lot of empathy because he just wasn't wired that way, but he did deeply care about people. However, he'd let himself get manipulated into this and then he tried to force the rest of them to roll over with him.

That was infuriating enough, but then Tony in his arrogance had tried to justify himself by guilt-tripping Clint for supporting Steve's point of view. He had the audacity to bring up Clint's family. As if that bit of manipulation weren't enough, Tony had said it in a government prison full of electrical monitoring equipment. How dare Tony speak openly of Clint's wife and kids, Clint's top secret, classified family that only his closest friends knew about? Stark had used Clint's private information like just one more tool to hammer the outside world into his image.

Just because Tony chose to make his Ironman identity and his screwed up issues public didn't mean that the rest of them had to do the same. And of course in his self-centered focus he hadn't even realized what he'd revealed. Hopefully their listeners didn't realize the importance of the information either.

Of course, Tony getting Falcon to tell him how to go after Cap had just played into the enemy's hands too. That was karma for you. The whole situation had become a steaming pile of crap. He would use much stronger and more colorful language in a variety of dialects to more accurately describe the depths of this situation, but Laura's campaign to keep his swearing down around the kids was still holding strong.

If someone came after his family because of this, Clint would make Tony pay. Of course, Tony was also Iron Man and both extremely paranoid and extremely rich. It would be difficult. Clint liked Tony, but Hawkeye had killed people he'd liked before. He didn't really want to have to kill Tony. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that, especially because he'd then become a hypocrite about the Bucky situation.

Maybe after he cooled down and if nothing pinged on the surveillance net around his family, he'd just make Tony buy Laura a vacation cottage on Prince Edward Island. Tony could afford it. Laura and the kids loved those Anne of Green Gables books. They'd been nagging him about visiting since before the last pregnancy.

Bypassing the shiny smartphones up front as not able to fully convey the true message of his feelings about Tony, Clint circled the kiosk. Crouching down to look at the bottom row in the back, he felt an evil smile stretch across his lips. Oh yeah, here it was, his holy grail.

The phone model looked ancient, from somewhere in the early 2000s as near as he could tell. The corners of the box were dented and the top had a sticky layer of dust from years of being passed over for newer and shinier models. It was some off-brand Clint had never even heard of in a bland shade of bluish gray. What really put the icing on the cake, though, was the fact that it was a flip phone.

Tony would absolutely hate it.

After grabbing the box, Clint bought the phone and then settled down in a back corner of the food court with a frothy drink and a skewer of meat. He activated the phone and memorized the number. Then he texted it to everyone else using his burner phone. It wouldn't do for Tony to have access to all of those numbers. Afterwards he programmed in the two numbers for the primary and secondary team phones for Tony. At this point, he was supposed to slip the phone into the box, mail it off, and then take a flight out of the country.

But where was the fun in that?

Kicking his legs up onto a chair and making sure his mini-crossbow and knife were near to hand, he began scrolling through the ringtones in the online store. The phone had initially struggled to connect to the mall internet, but after over two minutes it finally succeeded. Clint really hoped that Tony got stuck using this phone at some point, however unlikely the scenario.

The mean part of Clint wanted to select "Not Ready to Make Nice" by the Dixie Chicks as the ringtone. Tony was being a tool and Clint had no reservations about making his feelings known. Tony also hated most country music, even country rock. However, the whole point of the phone was to send a conciliatory message. If Tony had to answer to that ring tone, he'd make the caller pay for it, and that would make things difficult if Clint was the one calling for help.

Taking another sip of his drink, Hawkeye surveyed the food court to make sure no one suspicious had shown up. Luckily the news stations had finally moved onto other news than the breakup of the Avengers. He hated being undercover while his face played on nearby tv screens.

Not noticing anything that pinged his sense of danger, Clint went back to the small rectangular screen on the phone. Perhaps "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon would strike a better balance. After downloading the song and setting it as the general ringtone, he flipped closed the phone.

Clint pulled out the letter from Steve and went to slip it into the box when he realized something. The letter wasn't even secured in an envelope or taped shut. It was only folded. That was practically an invitation for Clint to read it, so he did.

Afterwards, he couldn't help but release a heavy sigh. Cap really did have a way with words. Now Clint was actually feeling sorry for Tony. Not completely forgiving, but still, he felt a little more mellow and sympathetic.

Steve had a talent for making people flip to his point of view. It must be the earnestness. Well, that and the super soldier, super studly good looks. Too bad Steve's earnestness didn't always work that great on Tony, but hopefully he'd take the letter in the spirit it was meant and not chuck the phone out the window.

Flipping the phone back open, an action which made him smirk all over again picturing Tony's face the first time he had to use it, Clint went back to the ringtone store. While the ancient phone tried to connect to the internet, he ate a few pieces of meat from his skewer and failed to identify the animal it had come from.

Nat would know, she always knew random crap like that, but she'd gone underground and away from both sides of this conflict. A message at one of their private drops had let him know she was alive. At least he had that.

Finally the phone connected again. Clint couldn't help but snort when his big fingers accidentally clicked on the kids section and Disney's "It's a Small World" popped up first. How sickeningly sweet. Clint selected that for the contact that connected directly to Cap's phone because he couldn't help himself. He'd have to steal Steve's phone and add the ringtone for him too, because he was a nice guy like that. Really.

For the backup contact number, Clint wanted something special, something to truly express himself. He left "You're So Vain" as the general ringtone just in case he ever needed to call Tony from a different number. Scrolling through the songs as quickly as the slow internet connection would allow, Clint felt his legs fall from the chair as he suddenly sat up and laughed. The song on the screen wasn't perfect, but it came pretty darn close.

After buying and downloading the song, Clint set it as the secondary contact ringtone, powered off the phone, and flipped it shut one last time with a grin. Pleased with himself, he placed the phone and the letter in the box and then taped it all shut. He'd seen a sign at a shop near the entrance to the mall advertising postal service. Clint mailed the box and then went outside to call a taxi to the airport.

As he waited, he couldn't help but sing under his breath,

"Every man ought to be a macho, macho man

To live a life of freedom, machos make a stand

Have your own lifestyles and ideals

 _Something something something_

Macho, macho man

I gotta be a macho man, macho macho man

I gotta be a macho."

THE END

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AN: My first drabble in over a decade. Also my twist on a songfic in a way. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know!


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